July 21, 2004 12:10 AM

I mistyped a query in Yahoo Weather this morning, feeding it "philadelphia, a" instead of "philadelphia, pa" ... it told me there was no match found. But the sponsor matches worked just fine -- correctly figuring out that I was looking for Philly and offering up hotel deals and home listings.

While agree that the search engine could have been more intelligent, but I imagine that the advertisements where just keying off of the town name, and the ranking portion of the advertising search engine listed Philadelphia PA first (is there another Philadelphia?)

I'd be curious to see what would happen if you mistyped a more common town name. Would the advertisement still match?

A way around this annoyannce would be to offer a "I didn't find XXXX, did you mean YYYY" kind of link. Though even that can be annoying too.

Posted by: Nelson Chadderdon at July 21, 2004 08:03 AM

What is funniest is that the first ad left out the "l" in "hotels."

Posted by: um3k at August 29, 2004 05:37 PM

"Hotes" - huh, must be short for "Hall and Oates," (the 80s band) get it? HAHAHAHA!

Posted by: sethn172 at September 19, 2004 12:54 AM

this is broken. the thumbnail opens to the parent window instead of a pop up. :D

Posted by: teng at October 26, 2004 10:35 AM

What's also funny is that "Philadelphia" is spelled "Philedelphia" in the second link (below "Philadelphia Hotes.")